@Andrew: Hi Andrew, thanks! I hear what you’re saying and I agree. Ever since folks started putting out a laundry list of names on fridays, it’s become harder and harder to find quality tweeple to follow. I still like the idea of #followfriday because everyone seems to love daily memes, but you’re right about the saturation aspect. I think your idea of using #rec is a fine example of the twitter community doing what it does best, solving the problem ourselves. You’ll see me using #rec from now on, thanks for the suggestion and the insight!

Nice post and introduction to twitter for new tweeps. I would like to take this opportunity to point out some of the controversy about #followfriday.

I wrote a blog post about this http://bit.ly/vZBfo

I must admit that in the past I have been able to find some great people to follow through #followfriday tweets, but lately this has gotten harder and harder.

The problem is one of efficiency. A search for #followfriday would reveal thousands, maybe tens of thousands of tweets, each containing simply a list of names. No descriptive information is included. To determine whether any would be of interest I would have to click each name, wait for a page to come up, and then examine the profile and tweets to determine whether the person would likely add value to my twitter experience. To my knowledge it is impossible to filter the results for tweets that contain descriptive information.

For me, and I suspect others, it would be tremendously more efficient to have contextual information by the person making the recommendation. This would allow me to only click on those that I would be likely to add based on the context of the recommendation.

I suggested to use the hashtag #rec,and to make recommendation throughout the week. This would allow people to search #rec anytime and not have to wait until fridays. Granted I nor anyone else is in control of how people ultimately use this hashtag. I can only hope that it helps to add value the experience of those who do.